PowerShell has a thousand nice features, but one of the nicer ones that I end up using all the time is the built in Write-Progress cmdlet. Shady the Intern came by today with a PowerShell script that printed dots to report progress, like:

Doing some stuff........................

I recommend he switch to Write-Progress. A nice feature of Write-Progress that I don't see used enough is the assigning of IDs to Activities, and then referencing those IDs as ParentIDs when writing out the progress of a Child Activity.

Here's a trivial example. Two for loops, each sleeping for a bit. The second for is a child of the first. Notice that ID of first loop is -activity 1 and the second references that activity via -parentActivity. This really adds, in my opinion, to the fit and finish of any script.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

Although the series of dots, or o's is a simple method to present status, I have always found it very nice to see an updated % complete. OS/2, yes, OS/2, had a great status on the commandline ftp, where it would update the % complete as it upload/downloaded files. This was all text based, and provided me with more information than a series of dots does.